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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #94,
8/30/2007

The New Slavery

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

[Subject to active editing for the next
day or two.]

Slavery was supposedly outlawed in the United States a century and a
half ago. One person can no longer own another and physically compel
them to work. However, the experience of slavery
continues to this day, and it is likely to touch all of us. Slavery
today isn't compelled by ownership but by economic need and by servitude to
prior commitments.

At some point in our lives, all of us have been forced to work for "The
Man." That is, we have had to do things we don't personally agree with
simply to receive a paycheck and pay our bills. That is the inescapable
nature of "work": It is doing someone else's bidding. When you work,
you are selling off some of your precious time in exchange for money.
It becomes slavery when we have little choice about where we work and
when the work itself has ceased to expand us.

You can make $200,000 a year and still be enslaved. There is probably
only a narrow field of work in which you can make this much money, and once you
achieve that level of achievement, you are chained to that career. Your economic
and social commitments have probably expanded to absorb the $200,000, so
you can't just quit and start a new career at $20,000, even if it were more
meaningful.

Doctors and lawyers can be just as enslaved as anyone else. After a
while, you're doing the same thing over and over again and have little
choice about how you spend your time. If you are creative and
resourceful, you will find ways to make the make the sentence pass more
quickly. Certainly, there is a nobility in doing your job well and in
serving the public, but the haunting question is whether it is the
best you can do.

Remember that the real coin of life is not money but time. True freedom
is to be able to use your remaining time in the most productive way
possible without being held down by either hunger or prior commitments.
One example of freedom would be to have a million dollars in the bank
while living like a hermit and not having any significant social
obligations. Then you could truly follow your muse and do what you
wished, presumably to the ultimate benefit of mankind.

This isn't the way things usually work, however. If most people were
given a million dollars or a $200,000/year job, they would quickly
construct a new prison for themselves based on that income. Their
expectations and commitments would expand with their resources, so that
hermit status is no longer good enough for them. Eventually, they would
become imprisoned once again, but this time at a much more expensive
level that is more fragile and difficult to sustain.

It is only a small step from imprisonment to prostitution. This is
where you are selling yourself to someone else's perceived needs without
doing anything to address their real underlying problems. The casino
and advertizing industries are institutionalized prostitution, but even
being a doctor can seem that way. As a doctor, who are you treating?
To a large extent, it is people who have taken poor care of themselves.
You patch them up so they can go off and engage in the same unhealthy
behavior. Doctors can feel enslaved to insurance companies and other
forces beyond their control, and their work may eventually seem
repetitive and factory-like. "Is this all there is to life?" they may
ask.

Ideally, your life should go through phases. You can be happy doing
something for a while, but eventually your perspective is going to shift
and your goals are going to change. The things that were important to
you when you choose your career path might not be important now. When
these unexpected internal changes happen, you want to be able to
rearrange your life to accommodate them. It is slavery when you are
forced to pursue your previous path anyway.

Of course, most people who are enslaved don't believe they are. They
support their delusion of freedom by suppressing internal change.
They develop a
ritualized set of hobbies and interests and do not deviate from them.
Twenty years from now, they will be pretty much the same as they are
today, except where misfortune forces change upon them.

We tend to think of slavery as dull, repetitive, backbreaking labor on
the master's fields, but slavery today can take many different forms.
Slaves produce most of our consumer goods: either slaves in China
working for pennies an hour or slaves in our own country working for much higher
wages. Slaves can belong to a union or be members of management. The
common feature of all slaves is that they are trapped in the patterns of
the past and have little real discretion about how they conduct their present lives.

We think of slaves as having a master standing over them with a whip.
Today, the whip is much more subtle. Punishment is economic: conveyed by
bank account balances and credit card payments. If you don't
do what some abstract master
wants you to, you will lose your property and your ability to support
the people you care about.

You don't have to physically shackle someone to force them to go to work
in the fields. A simply understanding of economic cause and effect is enough
to keep them in line.